CDs on Blu-Ray players

[Tetrachord]

Yesterday at my music group, during my 2 hour presentation on Nikolaus Harnoncourt, I tried to play one of my Harnoncourt CDs of the Complete Beethoven Symphonies which he made with the Chamber Orchestra of Europe in the early 90's. I had just received this set from Amazon UK. All my other CDs for the presentation played fine on the Blue Ray player which we use (as we have a TV as well) but none of these discs (I tried them all after the first failure) played at all. They refused and reverted to shockingly loud static. The CDs play on my own CD player and Walkman at home.

Does anybody know why this would be? It's the first time all year we've had the Blue Ray player fail to work for any of our CDs. As the venue and equipment belongs to the local University-Conservatorium we cannot just go and replace it with a CD Player of our own.

[Eine Alpensinfonie]

There's always a risk of slight incompatibility between players, especially when it involves discs of a slightly different format, and there can be similar problems with SACD discs. Blu-ray players should play all normal CDs. Is there any "added" feature on your disc that may have been incompatible with the player?

[Ferretfancy]

There's always a risk of slight incompatibility between players, especially when it involves discs of a slightly different format, and there can be similar problems with SACD discs. Blu-ray players should play all normal CDs. Is there any "added" feature on your disc that may have been incompatible with the player?

Have you access to the instruction book for the Blu Ray? Usually they have a list of all the formats that can be played on the machine, sometimes the information is available in the tools menu.

Incidentally, does anybody notice a difference in sound when playing compatible SACD discs on a non SACD player? I get excellent results on my Meridian player on normal CDs, but listening to SACD discs I detect a rather metallic edge, a sort of glassiness that reminds me of some of the earliest digital sound. Any comments ?

[richardfinegold]

Have you access to the instruction book for the Blu Ray? Usually they have a list of all the formats that can be played on the machine, sometimes the information is available in the tools menu.

Incidentally, does anybody notice a difference in sound when playing compatible SACD discs on a non SACD player? I get excellent results on my Meridian player on normal CDs, but listening to SACD discs I detect a rather metallic edge, a sort of glassiness that reminds me of some of the earliest digital sound. Any comments ?

Well ferret perhaps Meridian can sell you their new CD player that plays their own proprietary format MQA. It goes for $22,000 over here, but oops it won't play SACD.
Regarding the OP, I suspect the laser on the Blu Ray player is starting to go. When a formerly reliable player begins to have trouble reading certain discs, in my experience that is a bad sign. Perhaps you can bring a laptop with a CD drive to the next class, or failing that a cheap blue tooth speaker and have the music you want to play stored on your phone as MP3 . Then if the BDP gives up the ghost during class you have a back up

[Tetrachord]

Thanks for all these great comments, and I didn't spell Blu-Ray correctly. I don't use one myself, just a normal DVD player because I watch mostly vintage film from circa 1915, but some are as recent as 1996 ("The Birdcage" and "The Big Lebowski")!!

The Blu-Ray in question belongs to the university and, to my knowledge, there's no instruction booklet. An engineer in our group looked up the net and couldn't find anything to suggest why the player wouldn't handle my CD set by Harnoncourt. This worries me because I am co-convening the course next year with the other retired music academic!! Oh dear.. It will become my (shared) responsibility to make sure it works!!

Those tips about blue tooth speaker, storing music on the phone and MP3 are way beyond my skills. I have an I-Pod classic from December, 2010 which has on it about half my CD library (but it failed a year ago and took my son several hours to recover). The technology is beyond me, even though I know MP3s have been around for ages. I don't have a sophisticated phone and I have no use for one. This computer has no CD drive either, even though a Sony Vaio notebook. I could get an external CD drive, I guess, but it won't fix the problem of the Blu Ray for our course (each Thursday) for the rest of the year when others have presentations.

When there is so much music to hear, books to read, films to watch and current affairs issues there's just no time to learn new skills in technology. And it all costs money!!

Yes, you can call me hopeless but my excuse is being a 'senior'!!! Another problem is that the university is ditching its entire CD library and much of its recorded music. The librarian says "there's no use for it now; students can get these things from the internet". But they cannot look along the shelves for more than one recording of a work or a complete CD with all the liner notes and artwork; some of these things are fundamental as research tools and provide libretti, if nothing else. You may say, 'download it and print it' but that isn't the same. And it does involve a cost and additional time.

This move has been necessitated because the music library is moving out of the building, pre-renovation. But I looked askance at the librarian when she said, "there are so few students these days who refer to the recorded music library; only very occasional post-graduates". She said, "everything being studied has been downgraded; much of the rigour has gone and so that's why we don't want to hold onto resources we don't need".

Sigh.

[Dave2002]

Yesterday at my music group, during my 2 hour presentation on Nikolaus Harnoncourt, I tried to play one of my Harnoncourt CDs of the Complete Beethoven Symphonies which he made with the Chamber Orchestra of Europe in the early 90's. I had just received this set from Amazon UK. All my other CDs for the presentation played fine on the Blue Ray player which we use (as we have a TV as well) but none of these discs (I tried them all after the first failure) played at all. They refused and reverted to shockingly loud static. The CDs play on my own CD player and Walkman at home.

Does anybody know why this would be? It's the first time all year we've had the Blue Ray player fail to work for any of our CDs. As the venue and equipment belongs to the local University-Conservatorium we cannot just go and replace it with a CD Player of our own.

There are a few possibilities as to why you got the rather unpleasant "static" noises. I had a similar experience a few years ago when trying to rip some CDs for playback over my network. If the CDs use the extra pre-emphasis which is in the specification, and which CD players are supposed to decode, then that might cause a problem. Mostly it was Japanese mastered discs which had that "problem" - though they play fine on CD players with the correct decoding circuitry. Another possibility is that the discs have been encoded as HDCDs - which is a format due to Microsoft claimed to give better dynamic range on suitable CD players, but which syould be more or less transparent on a regular CD player. If you can detect either of these types of CDs before going to play them at your university venue, and you think they'll cause problems, then you might be able to rip them to a computer, then make new (regular) CDs from the ripped versions. Of course that doesn't help if you are confronted with the issue in a live situation - with no time to take precautions.

Some CD players have a light which comes on when special discs are put in, or an indication in a display, which might give a clue as to what kind of discs your Harnoncourt CDs are.

[Ferretfancy]

Well ferret perhaps Meridian can sell you their new CD player that plays their own proprietary format MQA. It goes for $22,000 over here, but oops it won't play SACD.
Regarding the OP, I suspect the laser on the Blu Ray player is starting to go. When a formerly reliable player begins to have trouble reading certain discs, in my experience that is a bad sign. Perhaps you can bring a laptop with a CD drive to the next class, or failing that a cheap blue tooth speaker and have the music you want to play stored on your phone as MP3 . Then if the BDP gives up the ghost during class you have a back up

A slight misunderstanding here, Richard. I'm not complaining about the performance of my Meridian player, it happily plays the CD layer of SACD discs, it's just that it emphasises a certain hardness in the sound compared to straight CDs. Meanwhile the sound processor in my system has a number of choices for synthesising surround sound from 2 channel sources. All sources are handled in digital mode through the chain,ending in DACs in the speakers.
Incidentally, Meridian have never approved of SACD, perhaps because they are pioneers in ambisonics. They assert that SACD is over engineered.

[Tetrachord]

There are a few possibilities as to why you got the rather unpleasant "static" noises. I had a similar experience a few years ago when trying to rip some CDs for playback over my network. If the CDs use the extra pre-emphasis which is in the specification, and which CD players are supposed to decode, then that might cause a problem. Mostly it was Japanese mastered discs which had that "problem" - though they play fine on CD players with the correct decoding circuitry. Another possibility is that the discs have been encoded as HDCDs - which is a format due to Microsoft claimed to give better dynamic range on suitable CD players, but which syould be more or less transparent on a regular CD player. If you can detect either of these types of CDs before going to play them at your university venue, and you think they'll cause problems, then you might be able to rip them to a computer, then make new (regular) CDs from the ripped versions. Of course that doesn't help if you are confronted with the issue in a live situation - with no time to take precautions.

Some CD players have a light which comes on when special discs are put in, or an indication in a display, which might give a clue as to what kind of discs your Harnoncourt CDs are.

Thanks; this does make sense!! One thing is interesting about this; I was unable to buy the CDs through Amazon, USA. They were listed as only available second hand. But I then found that I could purchase them new through Amazon UK and, of course, they are recordings from 1991. So, that's the only thing that's different from my usual purchasing of CDs and I wonder if it has any impact on that happened.

I've got to buy new HiFi soon so I'll take these discs and try them first at the Audio shop!!! Will have to test all future discs out on the university equipment before any future presentations of mine, but this isn't going to be possible for anyone else who is presenting a program.

It's disturbing to think there's not even technological uniformity with CDs - a technology which is now 33 years old.

[richardfinegold]

A slight misunderstanding here, Richard. I'm not complaining about the performance of my Meridian player, it happily plays the CD layer of SACD discs, it's just that it emphasises a certain hardness in the sound compared to straight CDs. Meanwhile the sound processor in my system has a number of choices for synthesising surround sound from 2 channel sources. All sources are handled in digital mode through the chain,ending in DACs in the speakers.
Incidentally, Meridian have never approved of SACD, perhaps because they are pioneers in ambisonics. They assert that SACD is over engineered.

No, the misunderstanding would be my fault. I was using your comment as chance to vent about Meridian's hyping of the new format, MQA,, which audiophile magazines have been over the top in praising as the greatest audio breakthrough since vertebrates were given hearing mechanisms, and charging an absurd amount of money to experiment with it. No offense meant to be given to yourself.

[Ferretfancy]

No, the misunderstanding would be my fault. I was using your comment as chance to vent about Meridian's hyping of the new format, MQA,, which audiophile magazines have been over the top in praising as the greatest audio breakthrough since vertebrates were given hearing mechanisms, and charging an absurd amount of money to experiment with it. No offense meant to be given to yourself.

Absolutely no offence! Actually I sympathise with the view that their stuff may be overhyped. They do tend to like complication in spite of their strictures about SACD, and there are features on my system that are very fiddly to set up, but I've had years of pleasure from it. I gave up reading audio magazines when I began to realise that the golden eared critics made a nice living praising the very expensive but not necessarily good!